Q&A: Public opinion plays shifting role in presidential policy decisions

Posted April 4, 2006; 09:55 a.m.

by Eric Quiñones

The specter of public opinion hangs over all decisions made by the
U.S. president, but how much weight does potential popularity carry in the
policy-making process? Do presidents or the public drive the policy agenda?

Princeton presidential scholar
Brandice Canes-Wrone examines these and other key questions about the
relationship between presidents and the public in her book “Who Leads Whom?
Presidents, Policy and the Public,” published in 2005 by the University of
Chicago Press. Canes-Wrone explores the shifting role of public opinion during
various stages of presidential terms and how much influence the president can
exert on the American people in promoting his initiatives. The book analyzes
presidential policy-making from Dwight Eisenhower’s second term through Bill
Clinton’s second term, reflecting the rise of television as the primary medium
through which the president communicates directly with the public.

Canes-Wrone, a 1993 graduate of Princeton, joined the University
faculty as an associate professor of politics and public affairs in fall 2004.
She previously served on the faculty at Northwestern University and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her fields of specialty include
presidential, legislative and bureaucratic politics, as well as the study of
elections. She recently discussed the issues raised in her new book.

What have you discovered through this book about the relationship
between public opinion and presidential policy-making? You note the concern
among today’s scholars and some Founding Fathers that catering to public
opinion too strongly could result in demagoguery. Does your research find that
concern to be well founded?

My evidence suggests that those concerns tend to be overblown, that
presidents are not as apt to follow public opinion as the founders might have
predicted. Presidents actually have incentives under a number of conditions not
to follow mass opinion, though they also have an incentive not to publicize too
heavily that they’re doing so. Under many circumstances, presidents want to
pass the policy that they think will produce good results — whether or not it’s
popular.

How big a role do citizens’ preferences play in presidents’ policy
decisions?

Citizens’ preferences play a
role in three ways. The first is that presidents are concerned about the ways
in which citizens ultimately will view policies. In addition, they can use a
mass appeal to go over the heads of Congress to try to leverage public opinion.
I think the perception among presidents and much of the public is that if the
president is popular he can go on TV and shift public opinion to get what he
wants. All of my evidence suggests that the time at which a president can use
public appeals most effectively is when he has a policy the public wants and
Congress — for whatever reason, be it party balance, interest group pressure —
doesn’t want to enact that policy. That’s what we saw with Reagan when he went
on TV for his tax cuts. That’s what we saw with Clinton and the budget debates
with the 104th Congress in 1995 and 1996 — that’s when he was really effective,
not when he was pushing unpopular policies at the beginning of his first term.

Finally, there are certain circumstances under which it does make
sense to pander to public opinion — that tends to be when the next election is
fairly soon and when the president anticipates a close race. By pandering, I
mean promoting a policy because it’s popular — even when presidents have
information that suggests the policy may not ultimately be in voters’ interest.

However, it is worth underscoring that one of the major arguments
of the book is that presidents have fewer incentives to pander to public
opinion than the conventional wisdom suggests. The book shows that presidents’
levels of popularity do not affect whether they will pander to public opinion.

Of the group you studied, which presidents were most likely to
pander to public opinion?

I find that the individual differences among presidents are minor
relative to the structural conditions. So things we tend to think of as very
personality-based tend to be diminished significantly by more structural
effects, such as the electoral environment.

For example, we saw Jimmy Carter,
who had been promoting an expansion of humanitarian aid, proposing to cut
humanitarian aid during the electoral race in 1980. Another example is the
first President Bush, who was against extending unemployment benefits during
the recession of the early ’90s, but once the electoral race heated up he found
reasons to support extending unemployment benefits.

In the book, I go through other reasons that these presidents could
have shifted their opinions: Have the policies changed? Have conditions in the
country changed? In the case of the Carter example, have international
conditions changed a lot? And I try to rule these out. I also gathered a large
data set of policies over time and looked at whether presidents are more likely
to take popular positions under the conditions in which I predict pandering
would occur. The patterns suggest presidents are indeed more likely to follow
public opinion under these predicted conditions.

Other than electoral concerns, what other conditions make
presidents likely to pander?

One interesting finding, although it is limited in scope by the
small amount of data, regards the behavior of second-term presidents who are
facing big scandal investigations or impeachment threats. The presidents who
looked most idiosyncratic were Nixon, Clinton and Reagan early in their second
terms, when each of them tended to behave like a president who was running for
re-election. You don’t usually think of Nixon, for example, as someone who was
really likely to pander to public opinion, but the data suggest the Watergate
hearings made him more likely to do so.

You cite Clinton’s public appeal in pursuing military action in
Bosnia as an example of when presidents can successfully sway public opinion.
When have presidents typically been most effective in influencing the American
public?

One of the arguments I try to bring home is that presidents are
rarely able to change mass opinion in a big way. Presidents always want to
think that they can do this. You see this with the current president as well —
he went out there with Social Security reform and thought he could shape public
opinion. But the evidence, over time, is that voters are not that likely to
change their opinions on policies simply because the president is promoting
them, even when presidents are very popular. That’s a lesson that presidents
find hard to learn.

But there is one big exception, and that’s in foreign policy.
That’s where the Clinton-Bosnia example comes in. In foreign policy, presidents
are often the primary or only information source available to people. In the
long term, other information can seep out about whether a particular
involvement is something that voters would want. But in the short term, if the
president is telling you that we really need to send troops into Bosnia because
it could spill over into Europe, people are unlikely to have hard-and-set views
that oppose him. In that sense, it’s not like school prayer or Social Security
accounts or health care. Voters are going to say, “I don’t know that much about
what’s going on in Bosnia, and this is the president.” There aren’t going to be
as many interest groups engaged as there are in domestic issues, and they’re
not going to be providing counter-messages. So presidents can do more of what
they want, in part because they’re going to be able to lead public opinion more
in this area.

You noted that President Bush, like his predecessors, tends to
believe he can sway popular opinion. Most recently, he supported the deal for a
Dubai company to take control of several U.S. ports, even though polls showed
it was very unpopular. What effect do you think public opinion — and his
diminished popularity — might have on Bush’s policy-making decisions through
the rest of his second term?

As I mentioned earlier, the book argues that highly unpopular
presidents are unlikely to pander to public opinion. Thus I would have
predicted Bush’s behavior on the Dubai port deal. In fact, I’ve received some
nice e-mail from faculty who assigned the book this term, stating that it was
great to have a book that squared so well with what we observe the president
doing in Washington today.

Furthermore, for Bush in his second term — and second-term
presidents more generally — the incentives to pander are not great for any
level of popularity unless the president becomes focused on helping a
particular member of his administration win the subsequent presidential
election.

I also would say that Bush has behaved in other ways that are
consistent with how presidency scholars believe second-term presidents behave,
in that he seems to have a concern for how he will be evaluated historically.
For instance, in his most recent State of the Union address, we saw him making
these big statements about decreasing dependence on oil and the fact that we
really do need to shift the way we think about energy. Of course, these
statements do have specific proposals behind them from the administration. But
I think such statements are about more to Bush than just a specific proposal —
this is about Bush and his place in the history books in terms of the ways in
which he’s trying to direct the country.